To Offer Hope You Must Have Hope

Abstract

As women on parole and probation transition from correctional facilities to the community, they face many threats to reintegration. Reintegration counsellors offer support to individuals on parole and probation who are re-entering the community. Working closely with a marginalized population places counsellors at risk for burnout and hopelessness. Research indicates that hope can serve as a sustaining and motivating factor when facing difficult working contexts. Further, a large body of research consistently confirms the importance of hope in the human change process, both for clients and clinicians. The current study investigated how reintegration counsellors fostered and maintained hope in their work, including their personal descriptions of hope. Employing Merriam's (2002) basic interpretive inquiry, five reintegration counsellors participated in semi-structured interviews about their work experiences. Thematic analysis indicated that hope played an important role in these counsellors' experiences of work and their belief in their clients. ARTICLE KEY WORDS: carers community work human services offenders stress women 61The overarching theme of the findings, Maintaining a Hope-Seeking Orientation, elucidates the complexity of maintaining a hope-seeking orientation in the challenging context of reintegration counselling. Specifically, participants in this study were understood to hold a hope-seeking orientation to their worklife that included, viewing life as a journey, maintaining a hopeful perspective, holding 'down-to-earth' expectations, and viewing hope-seeking as a learnable skill. Participants associated hope with both motivation and meaning, believing that hope was a necessary ingredient in their work and a resource to combat workrelated exhaustion. Implications for counselling include sustaining hope at work through a variety of means, including perspective change.

Hope and Helping in Social Work

“…Hope for change in more direct social work practice should also be evident. Hope is positively related to coping with stress for social workers and coping with both day-to-day, and sometimes extraordinary client situations are likely to require a healthy level of hope (Schwartz, Tiamiyu, and Dwyer 2007;Flesaker and Larsen 2010). As we have noted, as well as strengths, clients may present personal, family and resource problems that can be daunting for many social workers.…”

“…can benefit from helping (Coppock et al 2010), whilst several small-scale qualitative research studies show that professional care giving relationships are a key source of client hope (Eliott and Olver 2002;Flesaker and Larsen 2010). Several other research studies suggested that hope theory has served as a framework for developing successful help with individuals, couples, families and groups (Lopez et al 2000;Cheavens et al 2006Worthington et al 2007).…”

“…Coppock et al (2010, 620) emphasised therapists' 'hopes in their clients … have a central role in the ways that they implement "treatment"'. It is important to note that the therapist's hope is as much, if not more, predictive of progress than client hope and there is evidence of the transfer of hope from worker to client (Coppock et al 2010;Flesaker and Larsen 2010). Helpers' hopes in clients can affect them in various direct or indirect ways, such as by the use of interventions to instil hope and clients' reactions to these efforts.…”

“…For instance, hope theory and practice have clear relevance to social work intervention linked with existential, crisis, task centred, solution focused and narrative approaches. Jevne (2005) has pointed out that hope can be learned about, whilst research has demonstrated the effectiveness of cognitively based interventions to teach hopeful thinking skills (Cheavens et al 2006;Flesaker and Larsen 2010). Hollis, Massey, and Jevne (2007, 53) have clarified 'the identification of affirmative resources and strategies to support 'learned hopefulness'', whilst Larsen and Stage (2010) and Spano (2006, 2007) note the benefits of experiential learning about the 'will' power and 'way' power aspects of hope, for example, linked to exercises, role plays and video interviews.…”

The outsider within: The agentic practices of Family Group Conference coordinators in the context of families with children at risk

“…Indeed, hope and hopelessness are increasingly seen as fundamental for social work and care professionals (Collins, 2015; Flesaker & Larsen, 2012; Krumer‐Nevo, 2020). Coordinators in the study described how maintaining their own hope in the future enabled them to offer hope to the families.…”